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Everis , one of the largest IT consulting companies in Spain, suffered a targeted ransomware attack on Monday, forcing the company to shut down all its computer systems until the issue gets resolved completely. Ransomware is a computer virus that encrypts files on an infected system until a ransom is paid. According to several local media, Everis informed its employees about the devastating widespread ransomware attack, saying: "We are suffering a massive virus attack on the Everis network. Please keep the PCs off. The network has been disconnected with clients and between offices. We will keep you updated." "Please, urgently transfer the message directly to your teams and colleagues due to standard communication problems." According to cybersecurity consultant  Arnau Estebanell Castellví , the malware encrypted files on Everis's computers with an extension name resembling the company's name, i.e., " .3v3r1s ," which suggests the at

If you're using the popular rConfig network configuration management utility to protect and manage your network devices, here we have an important and urgent warning for you. A cybersecurity researcher has recently published details and proof-of-concept exploits for two unpatched, critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in the rConfig utility, at least one of which could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to compromise targeted servers, and connected network devices. Written in native PHP, rConfig is a free, open source network device configuration management utility that allows network engineers to configure and take frequent configuration snapshots of their network devices. According to the project website, rConfig is being used to manage more than 3.3 million network devices, including switches, routers, firewalls, load-balancer, WAN optimizers. What's more worrisome? Both vulnerabilities affect all versions of rConfig, including the latest rConfig ver

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a new cyberattack that is believed to be the very first but an amateur attempt to weaponize the infamous BlueKeep RDP vulnerability in the wild to mass compromise vulnerable systems for cryptocurrency mining. In May this year, Microsoft released a patch for a highly-critical remote code execution flaw, dubbed  BlueKeep , in its Windows Remote Desktop Services that could be exploited remotely to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP. BlueKeep, tracked as CVE-2019-0708 , is a wormable vulnerability because it can be weaponized by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically without requiring victims' interaction. BlueKeep has been considered to be such a serious threat that since its discovery, Microsoft and even government agencies [ NSA and GCHQ ] had continuously been encouraging Windows users and admins to apply security patches bef

Attention readers, if you are using Chrome on your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today. With the release of Chrome 78.0.3904.87, Google is warning billions of users to install an urgent software update immediately to patch two high severity vulnerabilities, one of which attackers are actively exploiting in the wild to hijack computers. Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says that both issues are use-after-free vulnerabilities, one affecting Chrome's audio component ( CVE-2019-13720 ) while the other resides in the PDFium ( CVE-2019-13721 ) library. The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption issues that allows corruption or modification of data in the memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software. Thus, both flaws could enable remote attackers

A group of Chinese hackers carrying out political espionage for Beijing has been found targeting telecommunications companies with a new piece of malware designed to spy on text messages sent or received by highly targeted individuals. Dubbed " MessageTap ," the backdoor malware is a 64-bit ELF data miner that has recently been discovered installed on a Linux-based Short Message Service Center (SMSC) server of an unnamed telecommunications company. According to a recent report published by FireEye's Mandiant firm, MessageTap has been created and used by APT41 , a prolific Chinese hacking group that carries out state-sponsored espionage operations and has also been found involved in financially motivated attacks. In mobile telephone networks, SMSC servers act as a middle-man service responsible for handling the SMS operations by routing messages between senders and recipients. Since SMSes are not designed to be encrypted, neither on transmitting nor on the telec

Another day, another massive data breach—this time affecting a leading web technology company, as well as both of its subsidiaries, from where millions of customers around the world have purchased domain names for their websites. The world's top domain registrars Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com disclosed a security breach that may have resulted in the theft of customers' account information. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Web.com is a leading web technology company that owns both Network Solutions and Register.com. The companies offer web services like web hosting, website design, and online marketing to help people build their own websites. What happened? — In late August 2019, a third-party gained unauthorized access to a "limited number" of the company's computer systems and reportedly accessed millions of records for accounts of current and former customers with Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com.

Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber , LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover (26) of Florida and Vasile Mereacre (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials. After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department. "I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this," the hackers said to the victim company in an email. "Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 digits, all

Skyrocketing data breaches bring incalculable losses to organizations and can cost cybersecurity executives their jobs. Here we examine the top five places in 2019 where cybercriminals are stealing corporate and government data without ever getting noticed and then learn how to avoid falling victim to unscrupulous attackers. 1. Misconfigured Cloud Storage 48% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud compared to 35% three years ago, according to a 2019 Global Cloud Security Study by cybersecurity company Thales that surveyed over 3,000 professionals across the globe. Contrastingly, only 32% of the organizations believe that protecting data in the cloud is their own responsibility, counting on cloud and IaaS providers to safeguard the data. Worse, 51% of the organizations do not use encryption or tokenization in the cloud. (ISC)² Cloud Security Report 2019 assets that 64% of cybersecurity professionals perceive data loss and leakage as the biggest risk associated with the